Continuity and change in Ciskei chiefship

Abstract:

The conventional wisdom of South African ethnologists, whether
liberal or conservative, has been dominated by the idea that African politics
operated according to certain fixed rules ("customs") which were hallowed by
tradition and therefore never changed. A corollary of this is that if
these rules were correctly identified and fairly applied, everyone would
be satisfied and chiefship could perhaps be saved. It is, however, fairly
well established that genealogies are often falsified, that new rules are
coined and old rules bent to accommodate changing configurations of power,
and that ‘age-old’ customs may turn out to be fairly recent innovations;
in short, that "organisational ideas do not directly control action, but
only the interpretation of action". The conventional wisdom was successfully
challenged by Comaroff in his important article, ‘Chiefship in a
South African Homeland’, which demonstrated that by adhering too closely
to the formal features of traditional government and politics among the
Tswana, especially those concerning succession, the Government wrecked the
political processes which had enabled the Tswana to choose the most suitable
candidate as chief. And yet Comaroff’s article begs a good many questions.
Let us imagine that the Government ethnologists read the article, and as a
result allow Tswana chiefs to compete for office as before, permitting
"consultative decision-making and participation in executive processes".
Would this prevent the Tswana chiefship from dying? Can we, in fact, discuss
chiefship in political terms alone without considering whether the material
conditions in which it flourished still exist? The present article will
attempt to situate the question of chiefship in a somewhat wider framework
than that usually provided by administrative theory or transactional
analysis.